If your company has already embraced Salesforce, this book should help to uncover ways that you can use it to gain a better competitive advantage; if your company is thinking of using Salesforce, this book can show you how to avoid early pitfalls and become a best-in-class user of it; and, lastly, if your company uses a different solution, this book will give you the secrets to replicating the success of Salesforce in your own environment, to the extent that is possible.
INTRODUCTION
Good ideas fail all the time. At the end of every year, the technology literati draw up lists of failed inventions and enterprises, pointing out the pitfalls and mistakes made. This practice has its roots in more than schadenfreude. Their desire, and that of their readers, is to understand failure and to learn from others' stumbling blocks. They want to learn how to succeed (that is, make a profit) for themselves and their customers, and studying past failures is an excellent exercise in what not to do.
Great products and services are the sum of many failures, each carefully combed through to pick out the good and discard the ineffective or detrimental. Take, for example, the iPhone. When it was first released, it was – and still is – a massive success, a true game changer in mobile technology. But Apple didn't start with the iPhone; it started with the Apple Newton.
The Newton was a play for the Palm Pilot market and was released with huge fanfare – handheld, mobile, new user interface, celebrity CEO, great expectations – and yet Apple pulled the plug less than a year after its release. Wired magazine called it a “prophetic failure” and they were right.3 The Newton, based on a cultural hypothetical and vision of the future, heralded a new age of technical innovation. It didn't fail because it was a terrible idea – it failed because it missed the mark in three key areas: data, design, and culture.
Data
Data was not the Newton's strong suit. It allowed the user to input data, but it was static and didn't connect to anything – zero interaction with a larger network.
Design
While the Newton looked cool, there was nothing in the design that trumped what consumers were already using. It was cheaper, faster, and easier to use a $3 notebook.
Culture
We weren't ready for the Newton – we didn't need it. We were barely using cell phones 22 years ago. And when a culture doesn't need something or can't see the value of it, failure is imminent.
Contrast the Newton with a product like Uber. Uber has achieved success because it delivers in ways the Newton could not – live data; simple, intuitive design; and a culture ready to embrace a ride share service that saves time and delivers a better experience.
If we were to map out Uber's success, their path to profitability would look a little something like the framework in Figure I.1.
Figure I.1 Bluewolf's Business Outcomes Framework
Uber's strategy lies in delivering on those four business outcomes: acquisition, expansion, cost reduction, and retention. Not every play supports all four, but every single action involves at least one (see Figure I.2).
Figure I.2 Uber Initiatives Mapped to Business Outcomes Framework
This book is about business survival for the rest of this century. It starts and ends with an obsessive focus on the customer and the ways in which customer experience is affected by other critical issues: the war for talent, employee engagement, leveraging data analytics, collaboration, creating the right culture, hiring and retaining good employees, even technology, although that last point will play the smallest part.
In today's intensely competitive digital world, there is an extremely high threshold for success, which filters out the “good enough” from the best. The purpose of this book is to provide you with a strategic framework to elevate your organization to the upper echelon of customer experience and drive profitability at all levels of your business. Here you'll find real examples of global enterprise success that Bluewolf helped guide to fruition, as well as essays by and interviews with industry leaders. Whether you have concerns about analytics, governance, or gender diversity, this book will provide the answers to the question of how to compete successfully on all fronts in the current digital landscape and deliver an exceptional customer experience.
1
DISRUPTION AND BUSINESS SUCCESS
Remember Kodak, the little yellow box factory out in Rochester, New York? They seemed like they had been part of our lives since…forever. But everything changes, and some organizations manage those changes better than others. When was the last time you bought a box of Kodak film, or any film for that matter?
Kodak, the photography giant, failed to navigate the shift from being a chemical company selling film and processing to the era of social media. Kodak thought it was competing with digital photography. Wrong. It clearly didn't understand its customers. Its customers were not buying digital photos. They were buying memories and creating and recreating their identities. As soon as a better alternative emerged, Kodak was toast; simply not agile enough to recognize and make the change.
So, what was that better alternative for creating identities? Facebook started it all, followed by other social media giants like Instagram and Twitter. And you can count on the memory-making business changing again. Maybe it will come in the form of the Apple watch or another type of wearable, or maybe in the form of something altogether different.
But just imagine if Kodak had built a bridge from film to digital photography to digital identity and then conceived social networking. It might be singing a completely different song today, a much happier one.
Growing up, I remember watching sweet, sappy Kodak TV ads around the holidays. They were filled with creating and sharing images of families and friends, loved ones, aging parents and grandparents, babies, new boyfriends and girlfriends. It was about capturing and replaying the customer's memories and using them to build their identities. Kodak approached the social revolution threshold, but never took those last few steps.
Not only do companies like Kodak change, but customers change, too. Today's customers are like water – they will seek the lowest point, driven by gravity to save time, to lessen the friction of buying, to align with products and services that provide transparency and objectivity and help them preserve memories and form and reform their identities again and again.
That's how I started this book – by focusing on customer identities and customer service. Customer focus is not about the heroic moments – it's not The Ritz-Carlton finding and returning the stuffed animal left behind by a guest's child. Yes, the Ritz excels at customer service, but that has little to do with finding lost stuffed animals. Great customer service is really about knowing what a guest needs even before the guest knows; it's realizing the photos are not just about memories, but also about identity. It's about noticing that a guest will be delayed due to weather or a flight disruption and won't arrive until 2 AM. Knowing that, you send the room key code to the customer's mobile device so they can go straight to their room upon arrival without even stopping at the check-in desk.
Better yet, heroic customer service is Berkshire Hathaway Travel rebooking your connecting flight because they know you're still sitting on the tarmac. They immediately text you updated travel details, relieving you of the worry and aggravation of further delays. Or it's your cloud software vendor serving you tangible data about your usage, which actually helps you to drive more return out of your investment.
Customer service and customer engagement used to rely on the heroic moment – the